DIY guide for in the SharePoint world

When writing search queries in C# code you sometimes get the following error. “Search has encountered a problem that prevents results from being returned. If the issue persists, please contact your administrator.” In most cases it indicates that your search schema is not correctly setup. You request certain functionality in your code but your ‘Search […]

My SP Toolbox. A quick overview of the tools I regularly use while creating solutions for SharePoint. Boost productivity and limit debug sessions. SharePoint Manager The SharePoint Manager 2013 is a SharePoint object model explorer. It enables you to browse every site on the local farm and view every property. http://spm.codeplex.com/ CAMLDesigner The CAML designer […]

Introduction Update 2013-09-07: The SharePoint Server 2013 CU of August 2013 and KB 2817607 seem to (partly) address the issue described in this article. If you tried and tested the update it let me know! From the support site: When you export a design package from a SharePoint Server 2013 site, some out-of-box (OOB) fields are missing […]

Ran into a problem where my SP2013 standalone development machine was running out of disk space. The reason turned out to be 61GBs of database log files. Here is small script for shrinking SQL Server databases that start with ‘SP_‘ or ‘WSS_‘. Very handy on a development machine. Make sure that the databases you want […]

When creating a Workflow in Visual Studio, make sure your created tasks inherit from the content type “Workflow tasks”. If not you might encounter the following error: Exception has been thrown by the target of an invocation. System.NotSupportedException: Specified method is not supported. at Microsoft.SharePoint.Workflow.SPWorkflowTask.SetWorkflowData I always forget this.

Introduction Language packs only translate the default SharePoint functionality. Your own lists, content types, fields, etc.. are not translated. Since SharePoint 2010 there is an option in SharePoint to translate elements in the user interface and export them. This export can then be imported again on another server. In my case this is mainly between […]

Introduction On the personal site (user profile) users are able to create new tasks assigned to themselves. However when looking at the site content there is no tasklist to be found. Turns out that the tasks in the User Profile are stored in a hidden list on the user profile site. The tasks are not […]

The problem How do you add a custom control to your master page (or page layout) using the Design manager? In my first attempts I continuously got ‘Unknown server tag ‘uc1:FeedbackControl’ Quick introduction Using the new way of creating and deploying your branding with the Design Manager needs some getting used to. The idea is: You start […]

Sometimes it is a lot handier to just update one of the dll’s in the GAC rather than go through the pain of deploying an entire SharePoint solution. In fact it’s one of the key features that makes the CKSDEV Visual Studio plugin so valuable. Not best practice, to copy directly to the GAC, but […]

I use the Visual Studio CKSDEV plugin so much that I almost forgot it’s not standard Visual Studio functionality. It’s no doubt the number one tool when creating SharePoint solutions with Visual Studio. Unfortunately the plugin is not yet updated for Visual Studio 2012 / SharePoint 2013. But the people at Mavention have created a […]